Real Thinking About Real Thinking
By Gabriel Chiron

The need for real thinking is not so that others or society will regard you as wise and thoughtful, as a philosopher.  Since others and society are neither wise nor thoughtful, their opinion or valuation of anyone about anything is meaningless.  You need to do real thinking because the evolution or development of your consciousness needs it.  Others and society do not give a damn about the development of your consciousness.  In fact, they do not give a damn about their own consciousness, and even if they think they do, they have no real connection with any genuine development of consciousness.  This is because they have no real thinking about it but content themselves with emotional imagination, beliefs and assumptions even where they believe they have spiritual, metaphysical or developmental aspirations.

 

There are other common substitutes for real thinking that include scientific materialism, post-modern destructive cynicism and clever show-off criticism.  Neither the emotional believers nor the brain-in-a-jar Dennettoid disbelievers do real thinking.  So the entire subject of thinking is far more mysterious and elusive than most classes of mentality want to understand.  Of all the philosophers of the Twentieth Century, it was Martin Heidegger who inquired most deeply into the meaning of real thinking, but post-modernists, such as Richard Rorty, try to tear Heidegger down as a sort of vainglorious metaphysician, while others like to imagine he was a Nazi when in fact he simply pretended to be one to protect his career and his family from Hitler.  He was under constant suspicion by the Nazis and ultimately persecuted.  The best of all Germans was oppressed by the worst of all Germans.  No, it is people in academia who could not handle Heidegger’s ideas who wanted to condemn him as a Nazi, which happens even to this day.  So there is nothing better I can do at this moment than to quote yet again Heidegger’s wonderful thought from his lectures on What Is Called Thinking:

 

          “What is most thought-provoking

            in our thought-provoking time

            is that we are still not thinking”.

 

Real thinking, which is original thinking, generative thinking, requires a voluntary discontinuity in one’s usual so-called “thinking”.  Edward de Bono calls it lateral thinking as opposed to vertical (or linear) thinking.  In fact, Heidegger plus de Bono = Chiron, I can say.  The challenge of real thinking is both pragmatic and metaphysical, which brings up a wonderful question:

What is pragmatic metaphysics?

 

Strangely, some people in Central Asia have for many centuries dedicated themselves to asking and answering this question as reported in the writings of Idries Shah.  If we read and meditate on those Sufi teachings, we do not convert to Islam or affiliate exclusively with their Naqshbandi Order.  For us, that would not be pragmatic even if it were rather metaphysical.  So now the formula becomes:

Heidegger + de Bono + Idries Shah = Chiron

Or Germany + Italy + Turkey = Greece

 

Geographically, this puts us somewhere in the Balkans, say Slovenia, Croatia or Serbia.  Yugoslavia becomes the cultural crossroads of potentially real thinking, yet they produce nothing of available new thinking and thinkers so far.  Too many societal problems and anxieties occupy their minds.  But, interestingly, there was an Armenian, Georges Gurdjieff, who seemed to almost dwell in the core of our formula.  Yet he failed to produce much more than a silly cult that to this day produces abberated idiots with big opinions of themselves who are certainly not doing real thinking in the sense of Heraclitus or Heidegger.  And they certainly have no foothold in the development of extraordinary cognitive faculties, such as are sometimes demonstrated by Sufis.  The bottom line, however, about all these various contributors to real thinking is this:

Real thinking is about pragmatic metaphysics.

 

Most people in our world will not like this, as we have said.  The brains-in-jars will not like the metaphysics and the spiritual believers will not like the pragmatic.  So we are back to Eliminative Materialism versus Folk Psychology.  Unbalanced brains who imagine they are thinking versus raw emotional cultists and New Agers who do not believe thinking is necessary.

 

Do you know why you need to do some real thinking about pragmatic metaphysics?  It is about your possible entry into the totality of your being as an existential and dynamical process of development of both your consciousness and your personal energy.  Perhaps we can say it is something like Zen Enlightenment plus your Kundalini Rising in a life of authentic and natural down-to-Earth effectiveness and true sanity without identifying yourself with a particular tradition on the one hand or clinging to naïve Earthbound so-called “Realism” on the other hand.  Do you understand this twofold requirement?  Most people don’t because their cultural or societal conditioning will not let them.  So, we have to quote Heidegger yet again:

 

“What is most thought-provoking

in our thought-provoking time

is that we are still not thinking”.

 

Will you admit to yourself that you still need to learn real, original, generative thinking?  You cannot learn to do something you imagine you are already doing.  Surely you want to now understand this better.  Since you are reading this article in private, no one is going to see that you are embarrassed and inadequate in the field of real thinking.  You can keep your dignity.  The only person who has to know about your embarrassing lack of real thinking ability is you.  But it is crucial for you to personally acknowledge to yourself that you are just a lowly beginner in all this, that you are not even half as advanced in real thinking as you or even others might believe about you.  Are you ready for this refreshing new step of humility and clarity about yourself, which is basic sanity?

 

It is basic sanity that enables us to do real thinking about pragmatic metaphysics.  Can you comprehend this totally and without argument or self-deception?  Do you see the beauty, the depth and simplicity of the thing?  Can you fully face your actual state of being with real awareness?  This is a kind of undramatic personal enlightenment which needs for you to not socialize about it, not try to prove to others that you are O.K. or important.  The joy, the release, the liberation that comes with basic sanity means that all resentment, envy or sense of being left out of the big important things, suddenly drop way from you, leaving you in an incredible new space, like a traveler to a far-out planet who has no need to report to the government or one’s relatives.  There is nobody you have to convince or persuade.  You are exploring real freedom.  You are a walker-in-the-void, the unknown.

 

It is an act of real personal freedom to become firmly grounded in basic sanity and do real thinking about pragmatic metaphysics.

 

We can develop these ideas.  The meaning unfolds.

         

 

 

 

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